


The Days of Our Lives

by bmouse



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Gen, Pre-Blue Lily Lily Blue, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-03
Updated: 2015-07-03
Packaged: 2018-04-07 11:01:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,591
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4260930
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bmouse/pseuds/bmouse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For their 'Photography' unit Blue's class gets 30 of those cheap plastic 35mm film cameras. Their first assignment is a photo-diary.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Days of Our Lives

It's not even budget cuts, it's just that Mr. Fineman the art teacher had his creative heyday well before AD 1990 and was still forcefully pretending that Photoshop didn’t exist. So for their 'Photography' unit Blue's class gets 30 of those cheap plastic 35mm film cameras that only people born before cameraphones could ever remember using. Their first assignment is a photo-diary.

"The Days of Your Lives!" as Mr. Fineman had said, and then chuckled to himself, ignoring everyone’s blank stares. Blue vaguely knew that he was referencing a soap that had been on when Calla was her age, but didn’t feel the need to share with the class. As one of the last in line, the camera she gets has a crack in it that had been indifferently patched with scotch tape. She’s almost tempted to show it to Gansey and watch him eel around trying to be diplomatic about the State of the Public Schools These Days, but it wouldn’t be worth it. 

Later that night she’s bored - the boys are studying for and end-of-week test and her room is a fair refuge from nosy cousins and missing mothers. Somehow she ends up giving the sad little thing a makeover. Off comes the fraying label and the Walmart markdown sticker. Then she replaces the scotch tape with a bright yellow novelty bandaid that says ‘Shark Attack' and doodles a spreading tree across the side of the camera with the white-out that a school supply list insisted she waste good money on, and which had never been used before today. Afterward Blue is a little endeared to it in spite of herself. Who couldn’t be, towards something they’d changed.

For the actual assignment she’s pretty confident winging it. As soon as she rolls out of bed the next morning she fumbles for the camera and photographs the backyard birch tree as it appears from from her half-open window. At first she feels a childlike sense of satisfaction - look at her; 7:10am and already making art. 

Then she realizes it's a little cliche. This is exactly what all of her classmates would do; start with their room as if it was the most important place in the universe. OK fine, next target; the little object garden on top of her dresser. That’s a little more unique, a little more unmistakably _her_. 

As she comes closer she sees that it's covered with a heavy gray layer of dust. Blue hasn’t been cleaning her tiny kingdom lately, hasn’t really been _here_ even when she’s home. There were things in her life now that knocked 'dust the dresser’ and ‘fix the cardboard trees’ so far down her priority list they could hardly be seen with the naked eye. 

Slightly unsettled she moves on to the the Phone/Sewing/Cat room because that’s where the streaks of early morning light are the most beautiful. There are three people in it. One of them is two and a half and crawling across the rag rug after the resident cat. Blue takes three shots, slowly and from different angles, secretly pretending she’s fiddling with filters and lenses and tripods like one of those capable women in windbreakers on National Geographic. Then she chews on her lip and wheels around to stomp her way downstairs because she’s just wasted three of her slots. 

She can’t use these, it’s all too… specific. Orla had photobombed one as she was walking back from the shower - her hair wrapped and the hem of her thrift store kimono trailing threads. Her cousin may have seemed bulletproof but Blue understood that if a picture of Orla less than perfectly made up and brand-name bell-bottomed made its way into the world of Henrietta High there would be a reckoning. And though Orla was annoying sometimes, in no way had she merited anything that could be seen as active meanness. 

Calla had been wearing only biker shorts and a silk lime-green slip for phone-duty. She must have gotten a prime asshole too, because as Blue was taking the picture she had slammed the receiver down and was staring at it with an ugly expression. There had been a rip in the crawling two-year-old’s shirt. 

Blue has an acute moment of ‘from-the-outside-in’-ness. What would the living-not-business parts of 300 Fox Way look like to other people? A boarding house? A brothel? Something that ended up in National Geographic in the bad way? In that ‘American Anthropology: Look at the Poors’ section?

Frustrated, she crams a yogurt into her pocket and goes outside.

The empty lot two houses down is as picturesque as ever. An empty concrete stoop stands in the center - all that remains of a tornado victim from years ago. The tall grass framing it makes the ruin look deliberate somehow - like a druid’s pulpit. A gang of thistles huddles and blooms by the front step but when she raises the camera to her eye the parts that pop out are the bent chain link fence, the cigarette butts, the soda can under the leaves.

_Adam’s rubbing off on me._

In the end she crushes the soda can with a heavy stomp of her Goodwill boot, three-pointers it into a gaping green recycling bin at the curb, and with her chin stuck out pugnaciously, takes the picture. 19 more shots to go. 

In the end she ends up with this:

\- The beech tree in the backyard, with a stub of candle still hiding in the roots.

\- The empty lot with the pulpit and the thistles.

\- A shot of _Nino’s_ parking lot from the front: Audis, Beamers and the 250+ bhp ends of the Nissan and Hyundai spectrum. 

\- And one from the back: the manager and the cook’s unglamorous working-cars, everyone else’s bicycles. 

\- Calla making a heavy bag swing back and forth during her boxing practice, her plum lipstick electric under the training room’s single swaying light.

\- Chainsaw’s claws over a pair of cupped hands, though not the ones she’s used to. These hands have freckles on the wrists and grease in the nailbeds. 

\- One of Persephone’s pies, with tarot decks stacked around it.

\- One of the more socially acceptable shots of Cabeswater, where it’s behaving itself and only looks like a bend in an ordinary creek with the shadows of striped dream-trout lurking under the water.

\- A blurry shot of a tall man in dark gray slacks and a pale gray shirt, holding up a volume of Medieval poetry so that it completely covers his face.

\- A picture of Blue herself, against a glossy orange background. The person taking the picture had waited until the exact right moment when she had stopped glaring at the camera and was instead reaching up to brush a ragged bang out of her eyes.

There’s filler too; pictures of less meaningful little everyday things scattered throughout. Presentation is important. Only a few people deserve the full truth of her. The rest can have only what she’s willing to show them.

Still, the one that really gives people neck whiplash as they walk past her project posterboard is one of the last photographs:

A shaved-headed is boy laying on top of a curb, smirking, with a blade of grass in his teeth. Another boy in an an Aglionby uniform is jumping over him on a skateboard. Strangely, though the skateboard is scuffed and solid, the rider’s legs seem faded, almost translucent, as if they were shot under a different light.

Eventually Mr. Fineman bustles over.

“Miss Sargent that is just _tremendous_!! How did you even get that?”

Blue knew it was a bit of a risk leaving Noah in, but he’d been so happy to have photographs of himself again. He’d taken the first one that had ‘turned-out’ - that wasn’t disturbingly blurry around his face or had his silhouette whited out, reverently out of her hands and had just stared and smiled at it for longer than a stranger would have found comfortable. Then he’d squinted and traced a hand upwards to find the part of his hair and whispered “...knew it was on the left.” Blue had then insisted on Group Pictures of Everyone, which ate through her remaining shots and a meaningful look from both Adam and Gansey had sent Ronan out to terrorize the nearest CVS for more film.

Still, Blue had sensibly considered the case where Henrietta’s first paranormal portraiture would get someone’s attention and had prepared an equally sensible lie. 

“I think some of the film was exposed, you know, before? I got it in the bargain bin. And we did a whole bunch of takes trying to get that shot, so I think I just got lucky with that one.”

“How very interesting! Any grumbling from your stuntmen? Any broken ankles?”

“No,” she smiles. “They’re both pretty brave.”

Everyone’s else’s posterboards stretch across the walls of the narrow classroom and spill out in the hallway. Blue looks at all of them. Everyone’s photographs are in their own way just as self-absorbed, just as mundane and mysterious. Everyone’s got their own world. There’s a word for that; an SAT vocab section word. Gansey would know. (Gansey does know but Adam beats him to the explanation. The word is ‘ _sounder_ ’)

Eventually she circles back around to her own board. There’s a few people stopped in front of it. One of her acquaintance-not-friends from freshman year turns around nudges her with an elbow.

“Looks like you’re having a good year, huh?”

“I am.” Blue nods. She’s thinking: magic, murder, mint-leaves, ravens, flowers, _them_. “I really am.”

~

**Author's Note:**

> O hai there, new fandom! Trying to warm up those writing muscles and find my Blue voice since she's so interesting...


End file.
